The Night Circus is a magical read

If you could go to a place, just for one night, that completely transcended the bounds of reality, a place that would change your view of the world forever and that you would unceasingly and eternally long to revisit, would you?

Written by Erin Morgenstern, novel The Night Circus transports readers to just such a place. Le Cirque de Revȇs, The Circus of Dreams, is a fantastical and wonderful setting full of magic and awestruck reverie. It’s also a battleground, the site of a mystical and mysterious game between two illusionists fighting to show off their opposing talents. It is a showcase of love and loss, friendship and competition, fierce battles and budding relationships between people and places pulled together by the magic within a few concentric rings of black and white tents.

Encompassing all of this and more, The Night Circus is a story of two adversaries spiraling headfirst into an inescapable web of adoration, collaboration, and shared magic even as the rest of the world threatens to tear them apart.

This entire novel came as the product of a few dozen days of nonstop writing during an event known as National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo is a process that begins every November, where writers around the word struggle to meet a 50,000 word limit in only 30 days. Morgenstern admits on her website to having spent several consecutive November months on the novel, writing over 100k words about Le Cirque de Revȇs before even introducing her main characters.

Celia, her female lead, is as engaging as characters come: an illusionist with a family legacy to uphold and a strong will capable of withstanding and creating things that normal humans could never dream of. She is just one challenger in the mysterious game that permeates the Circus, complemented and opposed by a clever and talented adversary named Marco.

The two of them together are revealed to be mere pawns in an eternal and mysterious competition, part of a multifarious and cleverly written cast of characters all swept up in the inevitable opposition between two different magics older than their society itself. Morgenstern’s use of characters that are as various as the circus’s many magical attractions helps keep the book engaging and entertaining throughout its 387-page duration; not once in the book is there a dull moment, and not once is there a character without well-written motives, actions, and unique character traits.

Despite the book’s many strengths, though, it must be mentioned that readers who abhor science fiction, fantasy, or this book’s genre of magical realism might be put off by the fantastical elements that it includes. Due to its quality, I would recommend it to anyone looking to attempt to try new things, but new genre readers must be warned that the book does include many elements that are not capable of being explained by realistic logic and reason.

The Night Circus is also not a book that is meant to be an easy read. It contains many different plot elements that are, at times, a tangled mess; the jumble of perspectives, storylines, and magical attractions in the circus might lead those not looking for a complicated read wondering what they are doing reading such a confusing book.

Overall, though, I adored The Night Circus. The entire novel was a joy to read, from the first page to the last; I personally finished it in a sole night, as I was unable to put it down. Morgenstern’s cleverly developed characters, setting, perspective, and imagery all provide images that manage to coalesce into a circus that seems almost tangible. This book shows readers another world, a realm full of magic and destiny and fortune, but one that is not entirely unlike our own. It provides the opportunity to look at our own world in a different light, to stare at the stars and the moon in the night sky with the hope that maybe, just maybe, magic like that of the circus could be real. And, really, something like that is all a reader should be able to ask for.